Grice The Semanticist

When Chapman wrote her book: "Grice: philosopher and linguist" she acknowledged that it was perhaps a good thing that Grice was then by the time the book came out, as he possibly would have felt offended to have been described as a 'linguist'. Not that he thought he was ABOVE them, or BELOW them, but that it just doesn't fit with Grice's education:

---- "Grice, educated under Hardie (author of "Aristotelian Ethics"), tutor of Strawson, Oxford university lecturer in philosophy. British Academy lecturer on "Intention and Uncertainty".

Tell me what LINGUIST would have SUCH credentials!

----

In any case, one can also play with

"Grice, the logician" -- I played with that in other work (re: history of logic) and trading on the Merriam-Webster's online dictionary that indeed has Grice as "British logician".

And then there's pragmaticist, that he never used. Since he hardly used 'pragmatics' ("pragmatic" inference, at most).

So, here for Grice the semanticist.

Jones writes in commentary to post on "Section VIII":

"I think it's correct to describe this [Section VIII -- Semantics for System Q] as a "truth-conditional" semantics (though more often it would be called "model theoretic", which usually is but I think need not necessarily be truth-conditional)."

Good point. I should work more on the notational variants here.

---- I think I like the idea of 'model-theoretic' in that if we think of all that Grice says about operators (other than the assertion indicative mode): ! (for orders) and ? for questions (in "Aspects of Reason" -- I have discussed those elsewhere), it makes sense.

---

Jones:

"In the light of the questions raised on the matter of compositionality which cast doubt on whether the meaning of a proposition can be merely its truth-conditions, it is of interest whether Grice commented on any possible shortfall in this kind of semantics."

Indeed. I noted that in Strand 6 (rather than the more substantial Strand 5) he casts doubt on 'truth-functional', rather. I.e. he says that he has sympathies for a truth-functional account of molecular propositions while granting that many may prove not to be so. (Opaque, rather).

----

Jones:

"In his retrospective epilogue, where he talks about central meaning, we see that the truth-conditions are considered to be part of the central meaning, though not necessarily the whole."

Right. I think in that context he must be having in mind his work for the John Locke Lectures (Aspects of Reason). After all, he had lectured the Stanfordians on the Immanuel Kant Lectures at Stanford and the same set of lectures at Oxford (John Locke lectures) and you read the thing -- rather brief -- "Aspects of Reason" -- and it's all about the Aequivocality Thesis, i.e. the idea that 'must' crosses the alethic-pratical border. So he must be thinking that while the 'alethic' is BASIC in some sense, it may not be ALL of the answer. In "Method" (repr. in his second book, "Conception of Value") he gives the voluntarist (as I am) some hope when he even defines the realm of the 'alethic' (belief) in terms of 'willing', and the 'boulemaic' (boulomaic) -- i.e. having to do with desire. So I would think he was aware that some 'moves' in the conversational game need not be 'alethic' in that respect --.

Jones:

"So far as I recall, there is not much said about what else there might be, though there are these other criteria which he mentions "dictiveness" or "what is said" is one."

Indeed. And if I am right that he may having the 'practical' as he calls it (misleadingly) in "Aspects of Reason", it would be good to compare this with some uses of 'dictor' and 'dictum', in Hare. Hare's thesis at Oxford had been on Frege, and his "Language of Morals" predates some of Grice's published stuff. In his earlier work, Hare had used

dictum
dictor

as the big distinction. And he is of course ONLY interested in 'imperatives'. So he KNEW. He wants to say that

"Open the door!"

has a dictum -- and a dictor.

The dictum is what is SHARED with

"The door is open."

---- (which is alethic).

Grice unfortunately prefers to use 'practical' to oppose to 'alethic' in "Aspects of Reason", and unless you realise the linguistic games here one may be misled.

A few years later Hare had the genial twist of idiom, and coined the 'phrastic' to correspond to the 'dictum'. Which is a better idiom, the phrastic. First, it's GREEK rather than Latin, therefore 'classier'. Hare needed a correlatum for the 'dictor' (the illocutionary force indicating device as it were). So he coined 'neustic'. These two are recognised by the OED.

I once corresponded with Mrs. Julie Fields, who works for the OED, and I wrote:

"Dear Mrs. Field,
I see that the OED has Hare's phrastics and neustics. What about his tropics and clistics?"

She replied,

"Dear Speranza,
Unless people really START using those terms -- do you think it a good policy for the OED to include them just to please you" -- or words to that effect. I love her.

I have used "tropic" and "clistic" but the idioms have not yet made it to the headlines.

They were introduced by Hare some 30 years after he coined 'phrastic' and 'neustic'. The 'tropic' is the mode-indicator. As in "indicative".

Surely, not all things said in the 'indicative mode' are assertoric:

"that the moon is made of cheese"

Cfr.

"that the moon BE made of cheese".

Similarly, the distinction between the indicative conditional and the subjective conditional is one of 'tropic' for Hare.

The clistic is the closure sign, as in "."

The cat is on the mat.

Unless you write "." you never know. The utterer may go on:

"The cat is on the mat -- my mother thinks".

So we need a sign of closure. This is the clistic.

For some reason, Grice's big ego (I love him) disallowed him to recognise the genius of Hare, but _I_ will!

----

Jones:

"Do we know whether Grice's conception of "formal semantics" is confined to truth conditions, whether he construed it as potentially encompassing the whole of "central meaning" or even as going beyond central meaning?

---- Good points. No. I wouldn't think if he construed 'formal semantics' as "going beyound central meaning".

But then, perhaps his idea of 'central meaning' is not so ... central!?

---

But as I say, "Aspects of Reason" seem to be the key. In the most abstract (and perhaps most boring) sections of that book, there is a sketch of a 'formal semantics' for non-alethic utterances. Note that the book is all about validity in the realm of "must" utterances -- vis a vis ceteris paribus clauses and practical reasoning -- Sometimes involved in conjunction with probabilistic reasoning.

--- And in a few paragraphs there he mentions other notions, which is pretty safe to say that Grice found MORE GENERAL than 'alethic'.

The term here is:

'accept'.

Grice wants to say that it is rational to ACCEPT that it is raining, say. (When it IS raining). It is also rational to accept that "it is raining or it is not raining". And it is rational to accept anything that is entailed. Or rather, that it is rational to accept the consequences of a valid piece of reasoning (assuming one accepts the premises -- but this is conditional).

So, there are various places, in print, and mimeo, where he uses

"accept"

as a general term to encompass 'belief' and 'desire'. It is vague to find out what makes one's desire 'accepted' or 'acceptable', but I think he was into organising something like Aristotle's practical syllogisms and indeed the realm of Kant's practical reason. There ARE 'valid' practical pieces of reasoning, and these a rational person has to accept. (Grandy/Warner make it explicit how these utterances in modes other than the indicative rely for their 'validity' on general principles of the practical sort).

-----

In "Aspects of Reason" Grice also trades with the idiom of 'satisfaction' -- as used by Tarski. I haven't checked what Polish term Tarski used.

But I think Grice played at times and various places with the idea of

truth -- as FACTUAL satisfactoriness. I think one explicit passage in "WoW:II when he expands on his conversational-implicature account of truth:

"Let me assume (and hope) that it is possible
to construct a theory which treats

TRUTH

as primarily a property of utterances. To avoid
confusion, I shall use, to name such
a property, not 'true' but

"FACTUALLY SATISFACTORY".

----- "Let me also assume that it will be a
consequence of such a theory that there will
be a class K of utterances (utterances of
affirmative subject-predicate sentences) such
that every member of K (1) DESIGNATES some
item and INDICATES some class, and (2) tis

FACTUALLY SATISFACTORY

if the item belongs to the class. Let me finally
assume that there can be a method of introducing
a form of expression ['true'] and linking
it with the notion of 'factually satisfaotry',
a consequence of which will be that to say
["'the S is P' is true", Smith is tactful,
Fido is shaggy] will be equivalent to saying
that any utterance of class K which
designates Smith and indicates the class of
['tactful'] people is FACTUALLY SATISFACTORY
(that is, any utterance which assigns Smith
to the class of [happy] people is factually
satisfactory". WoW: 56

(Grice has Smith as 'happy' in WoW:II but as tactful in WoW:VI, and I prefer having Smith as tactful in that this allows Grice to play with utterances in tropics other than the usual neustic one: "Smith, be tactful!"). And so on.

K. M. J. who teaches Linguistics at Cambridge has recently applied Grice's notion of 'acceptability' to an account of the semantics of some deontic modals. Which is good.

In "Aspects of Reason" then, Grice allows for 'satisfactoriness' to be other than 'alethic'. And not only that, but allows the philosopher to be concerned with the GENERAL patterns of rationality.

Grice played with this:

"Hare is our man in ethics".

Grice found that insulting. How can someone be "our man in ethics". Philosophy, like virtue, is _Entire_. Grice says. So, since he saw himself (or hisself, as I prefer) as a philosopher, he knew that there was a general paradigm that Hare failed to practice but he (Grice) didn't! Genius!